My favorite records are not easy - they're not records that reveal everything to you the first time out.
You play a couple of shows, and these label guys come - and they leave halfway through a show. Then the phone calls just stop. And your heart is broken.
I'm mostly a keep-to-myself kind of guy, but you slowly find yourself getting folded into the musical tapestry.
I feel if I wanted to be taken seriously I have to study music the same way someone who wants to be a doctor would study medicine. You have to know your craft and by doing so I had to make sure to ignore what people were thinking as well.
I think sitting in the car with your parents and listening to music is an essential to growing up.
I'm an introspective human being and someone who likes to be alone in a room. The idea of going out and talking to people...there's something appealing about it, but also there's something that feels alien to me, as a cynical Irish man.
I approach every show from the same fundamental perspective: this is a conversation, and my job is to make people leave the show feeling like they've seen something singular. It's not about smashing someone over the head from the jump-off.
When I started out making music I thought it was about thrills and adding layers, but I realized I want to focus on saying the most with the least.
Music is a self-propelling thing. You can not rely on anybody but yourself.
What we understand to be profoundness, or importance, it changes. It should change. It should be this moment where you cannot believe that equalled grandness or importance.
I do not think good art comes from comfort. While from a humanistic standpoint I would have much rather been at my home that I own, surrounded by friends and family and controlling my environment completely.
Life is short. I'm here to make music, I'm not here to sit on a beach. That sounds really boring to me.
Hip-hop has been the guiding light of my life as a musician and a music fan. It's the one common thread through all of it from the time I bought my first record probably. It's always been there.
The hip-hop aesthetic and the way it's produced always motivated me. Alongside that I was still wanting to make great traditional songs because I've never had any desire to rap. My love of hip-hop is driven by my love of rappers, but it was built out of my love of producers.
My love of R&B and hip-hop has influenced my life not even as a musician, but generally in terms of growing up and looking to America as an inspiration.
I'm not an L.A. guy. I don't take meetings - you know what I mean? I don't really know how to interact very well with people in L.A. because everybody's got an agenda and everybody's like, "What do you do?" "Where are you going?" Or it's like, "What do you know?" And I'm not on a grind - I was there to make music and to meet people but I wasn't hustling for anything.
At the end of the day music is a grind. You're constantly working at it and even with playing shows as well. If your schedule isn't planned right it could really throw things off, but honestly at the end of the day its incredible being able to go to so many places.
Music is really everything I know. To be honest every experience I've ever had has been brought up from music and everything I do is because of music. I don't know anything else, I think about music before I go to sleep and it just really is everything that I am.
I feel the reasons my songs might seem dark is because of how I viewed the situations I was in and it was just something I always felt like documenting.
Its always important to fall back on your instincts and core beliefs and that was pretty hard for me to do but trusting in my self the way I trusted that if I were to sit at a piano for two hours and I was going learn something, that trust I'd put in myself really helped me get through it. For five to six months I just wrote songs and believed they would turn out to be things I could be proud of and be happy.
I made a note in my head to be aware of things as they were happening, because they might not happen again. Up to that point, I was not really that appreciative of what was going on, or thinking about documenting life in a plainspoken manner. I was talking about my life and writing songs, but then I would go back and listen and they were about dreams, and legends, and metaphors and that was just not my life!
